Ambrosia releases WireTap Anywhere audio capture tool

In the Mac audio software market, Ambrosia's WireTap Studio made a splash last year when it launched, offering lossless capture and audio editing with a fresh interface (and competing with incumbent heavyweight Audio Hijack Pro from Rogue Amoeba). Although it aimed at being an end-to-end solution for basic podcasting and audio production needs, the limitations of the built-in editor meant that high-end and pro users still needed to export from WTS to complete a project elsewhere. Since most pros end up in another editing environment anyway, why not have the underlying capture engine from WTS available to any recording application, and turn your Mac into a virtual patch bay?

That's the concept behind Ambrosia's new pro-level (and pro-priced at $129US) capture tool, WireTap Anywhere. Rather than the two-channel recording options of WTS, with the WireTap Anywhere preference pane you can route and mix multiple audio sources and deliver them to the recording application of your choice. Want Skype, iTunes and QuickTime sources all to end up in Peak or GarageBand? WTA has your back. You can check out several demo movies at Ambrosia's site or download the 13MB demo.

I've experimented with several combinations of recording software and application audio capture tools (Soundflower, Übercaster, Call Recorder, Audacity and AHP among them) and I've yet to find the perfect setup that allows me to combine live audio chat from Skype with music or sound effects played in QuickTime or iTunes, all audible to the remote call participants while being recorded cleanly and latency-free on my end; Übercaster comes awfully close, but the current 1.5.5 version still has issues with Skype dropouts. I'm looking forward to giving WTA a test run to see if it can meet the challenge.